Some collectors buy art because they enjoy it, some do it to show off and some simply want to fill their walls.
For others, collecting is a true lifeline, and Amanda Precourt falls into that category.
Precourt, a real estate developer who lives in Denver, is also a mental health advocate and philanthropist who has been frank about her own struggles. She and her father, Jay Precourt, were the lead funders of the Precourt Healing Center, an inpatient behavioral health facility in Edwards, Colo. — opening this week near the Vail ski resort — where she also has a home.
“I’ve been speaking out about it for seven or eight years,” said Precourt, 51. “I’ve always struggled with anxiety and depression. Eventually, I just said, ‘This is who I am, I don’t want to hide it anymore.’”
Her openness and advocacy has overlapped with, and informed, a burst of serious art buying.
Collecting, she said, is one of “the myriad ways that art has saved me.”
The first major work she collected, in 2016, was a punching bag made that year by the artist Jeffery Gibson, “Know Your Magic Baby.”
Gibson, known for incorporating his Indigenous heritage and traditions in his works, lives in the Hudson Valley of New York and represented the United States in the county’s official pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
“The words ‘know your magic baby’ spoke to me,” Precourt said. “I thought, ‘I want this piece around me. I can feel the energy.’”
Working with Gould Art Advisory, Precourt quickly put together a significant trove of contemporary art.
Precourt has worked with more than 20 galleries that are showing at Frieze New York this week, including Gagosian, Perrotin, Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner.
She is also financially supporting one of the biggest contemporary art shows of the spring in New York, “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” at the Guggenheim, which is on view until Jan. 18, 2026.
Her collection now includes several works by Johnson, as well as ones by Huma Bhabha, Carmen Herrera, Anselm Kiefer, Theaster Gates, Mary Weatherford, Tara Donovan and Sam Gilliam.
“If I can feel the artist’s emotionality in the piece, I’m drawn to it,” she said.
Those works and many more are in her sprawling, 7,900-square-foot home in the Baker neighborhood of Denver, housed in a 1940s fortune cookie factory that took her almost a decade to secure and renovate.
Her home is on top of a new, personally founded exhibition space — free and open to the public, and noncommercial — called Cookie Factory, which opens May 24.
“It’s not about art as transaction at all, but about art as experience,” she said.
Cookie Factory will have two solo artist shows a year. The works will mostly be new and commissioned by Precourt, with artists invited to come to Colorado to be inspired by the local landscape. She will not necessarily be acquiring the works. She tapped the curator and critic Jérôme Sans to be the artistic director, and Precourt’s life partner, Andrew Jensdotter, is the director of exhibitions.
The first show features work by Sam Falls, of the Hudson Valley, known for his abstract paintings. He visited Colorado’s Yampa River Valley last fall.
In the home that she shares with Jensdotter, Precourt’s personal trove includes both paintings and sculptures (as well as a collection of cookie jars, just for fun).
She has a particular penchant for densely patterned abstractions like “Engel der Geschichte” (The Angel of History) (2005—2017), a 2,500-pound, 21-foot-wide mixed-media work by the German artist Anselm Kiefer. It is so heavy that she had to have a wall specially constructed and the floor below it reinforced.
Precourt has no problem putting art first and building around it. For Johnson’s 16-foot-long work “Untitled Escape Collage” (2019), she built her music room (complete with D.J. station) around the work, only putting on the door to the space after the art was installed, because it would not otherwise fit through the doorway.
Johnson said that Precourt has “quite a significant group of works” of his, including the one in her music room, which he called “the largest collage I’ve made to date.”
He added, “There’s something to be said for someone who is willing to make themselves uncomfortable to accommodate an artwork.”
Johnson — who describes himself as being in recovery and partly made his name with his “Anxiety Drawings” series, filled with dense red shapes — also bonded with Precourt over their shared openness about mental health issues.
“We align, and that’s rewarding,” he said. “It’s good when your work is being received not only aesthetically, but also for the emotional and social concerns.”
As with other sought-after artists, Johnson’s representatives at the gallery Hauser & Wirth are in a position to decide who gets to own his work, as demand outstrips supply.
“From the beginning I was struck by her approach,” said Cristopher Canizares, a partner at Hauser & Wirth who works with Precourt. “There’s a sincerity I wish was more common. She really cares about art.”
Canizares said that the Cookie Factory project sounded promising for Denver. “We see collectors all over the world build private museums and foundations, but oftentimes it’s associated with the identity of the collector and their name is on the building,” he said. “That’s not the case here. It’s not about her.”
Precourt grew up in Denver in a wealthy family with a philanthropic bent, and she worked as an intern at the Denver Art Museum as a teenager. She recalled, “My dad encouraged me to work and I said, ‘I want to work at the museum.’ I was 14.” Precourt graduated from Stanford University and worked in banking early in her career.
Now, she sits on the Denver museum’s board of trustees and chairs its collections committee; her $4 million gift underwrote construction of the Amanda J. Precourt Galleries.
“She definitely has an eye for contemporary artists,” said the museum’s director, Christoph Heinrich. “She’s gutsy with her choices. She’s a trailblazer.”
Precourt’s frankness extends to talking about selling pieces, too — a topic that some collectors eschew, lest they be seen as too transactional or short-term in their approach. Last year she sold a work by the British painter Cecily Brown, “Saboteur Four Times” (2019).
“It was getting so valuable, and it was in a place that was precarious — the dining room,” she said. “I was worried someone would spill red wine on it.”
Deciding what to do with the proceeds was easy. “I thought, ‘If I sell it, that’s three or four years of runway at the Cookie Factory,’” she said.
Precourt thoroughly enjoys contemplating the many works that currently surround her, including two inkjet prints on canvas, both of which incorporate denim, by the Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, who splits his time between New York and Bangkok: “4 Gravity and Grace” (2021) and “From Air to Fire” (2023).
“They’re contemplating heaven and hell,” she said of the pieces. “And they ask, ‘Why are we here?’ I spend a lot of time thinking about that kind of question.”
